Robin Williams won an Oscar from his fourth nomination for portraying Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting.
Robin Williams plays the
psychotherapist who helps Good Will Hunting (Matt Damon) deal with his past, and attempt to help him forge his future. Maguire is a movie psychiatrist in all regards, revealing a bit too much to his patient and also getting a little unrealistically close to him too. Now first of all the technical aspects of this performance are poor. No one can do a natural Boston accent well in this and Williams is no exception. His accent is especially strange, where Ben Affleck and Damon kept a poor accents consistent, Williams randomly includes the accent which is both odd and distracting. Another problem I have with his performance is one brief scene where he breaks character. Williams always seems to have trouble not reverting to his comedian self such as his imitation scene in Dead Poets Society, and here where he talks about Maguire's deceased wife's farting problem. He really makes an awkward transition in the scene from the character than telling to joke getting to much like himself, then quickly reverting back. It was an unneeded part of his performance which only takes away from his realistic approach in the rest of his performance.
Now his performance is meant to be that of a real working Bostonian who only happens to be a
psychotherapist. Now I never believe that in the least that Maguire has his past because Williams never makes it believable that he does. He never really shows this well enough, and his attempts to seem real working class are laughable at best. His scenes with Damon range from okay to over the top. Okay are say his speech about how Will Hunting doesn't really have real experience, but over the top are like his first encounter where Maguire says he will end Will for making fun of his wife. Williams goes way over the top there and never is believable. He is okay at times but the big emotional scenes always seem to fall a little short, as if they were trying too hard to make them emotional intead making theses scene a little artificial. Otherwise than that he has some okay scenes with Stellan Skarsgard, but again only okay. He is always a little off because the character at his core is not believable due to Williams. At best he is okay and at worst he is awkward and poor. Overall he is more bad than okay making his win rather undeserved.
